Being a bartender and dating someone who's a high school teacher means suddenly having a LOT of free time to grow a pot belly eating potato chips and scanning rock formations. Especially when she's inadvertently helping you find the energy to wake up at 7AM.


WHAT WORKS:

• Scale. Scale. Scale. Scale. Scale. The galaxy map is intimidating. Seeing hourlong estimates for on-foot travel time is insane, and it can be fun to roleplay not wanting to use the pulse drive because you need to take some time to read the afternoon's news or want to just kick back with a beer and enjoy the horizon line of a planet with two moons.

• The lack of gravity. Sure, it's a bit weird that every planet has the same physics (I swear I landed on one planet where my character took several minutes to 'adjust' and was moving very slowly, though) but not truly accounting for gravity allows for some truly incredible vistas of planets on planets. I also like that they at least nod to the absurdity of it with certain planets having crazy hovering plateaus and things.

• The melee/jetpack boost. For a while I refused to give it a shot, thinking I was enjoying enough the simple pleasures of walking and running. But after giving it a shot...I mean, the game obviously wasn't designed with this sort of movement in mind but maybe it should have been. If you were the sort of player that pack-burst your way around Destiny's levels just for the sheer joy of the movement, you're doing yourself a real disservice if you don't look this up and learn the timing on it immediately. You'll get hurt a lot, but rarely enough to lose your shields and even then, you can really feel the aggression of your character's new movement style.

• The core loop of things. I've never enjoyed (more accurately, thought I would enjoy) a purely survival game. Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 are two of my favorite games, but they pack in some great characters, tailored environments and a linear storyline to go along with the loot management. No Man's Sky roped me in long before it was exposed as a survival game, but past the first couple hours the survival stuff mostly falls by the wayside in favor of the exploration fantasy. Game the beacons for shelters on lush planets and you'll come across several drop pods that make inventory more manageable. Stumble across a planet with dozens of language translation monuments, plaques, terminals and more and suddenly find yourself being gifted fourth and fifth tier tech from the native race while half their sentences appear in English. NAMING THINGS. I get so hooked into the good planets (and have way too much hope for the shit ones) that it's hard to remember there are, uh, 17.999 quintillion or whatever planets left to go.

• NAMING THINGS. I got a six planet system named after Miles Davis' "Milestones". I got one named after cocktails, one named after glassware, working on one named after mixtape rappers from 2011, and one where I just went and tried to make up names for Halo levels. For every "Mr. Tomatohead" or "Bungled Tortoise" there's a dozen names as amalgamous as the creature itself ("Jackarex", "Jackalope", "Chickenfooted Pigfly") but even the uncreative ones are fun to think of and then see out in the wild and think to myself, 'Ah, another 'Gatorweiller'."

• The variety. I have been to hell and been to heaven already in this game, but it's a testament to the algorithm that the other nine planets I've been to have fallen somewhere on a vast spectrum of between. After two marathon play sessions there is still a tangible adrenaline rush when you begin breaching atmosphere on a new planet. I hope that feeling never leaves.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK

• Inventory. Even with 18 ship slots and 24 exosuit slots, there's still not enough space to go around when you find something you want or need. There's also no easy way to remind yourself what an element is useful for, and there DEFINITELY isn't a way to take advantage of things like stumbling onto a super rare material like Copper when you have no blueprints requiring it. I found Copper on one planet and can't for the life of me remember where and it's starting to become required in large amounts for everything I want to craft and I'm driving myself space-bonkers trying to figure out where the fuck I found it, or where else I can find it. This game needs a vault you can only access through the trade computers but can store things in at any time, and it also needs to explain to me why I can transfer items to my ship from any conceivable distance but I can't take things back out of my ship. Ain't nobody building a one-way teleport machine in a galaxy like this.

• The lack of maps, and maybe the worlds in general. I've begun making a Google Doc noting the unique features of each planet in case I need to go back for something specific like Titanium, or I want to farm Vortex Cubes (I found this weird planet that was nothing but security-locked Vortex Cubes and spent an hour stealing three at a time then melee/jetpack boosting to a hiding spot while Sentinels scanned for me for over two hours. It felt fucking RAD) but I've come to learn the algorithm likely only spits out colors and basic ecology to your system...so the planets refresh in every other way each time. It hasn't been proven if mineral deposits are tied to the ecology yet but it seems at best a 50/50 shot right now. All this is to say that as my knowledge of the galaxy expands, I'm beginning to worry I have less ownership than it felt like I did when I saw my second and third planets in a single system.

• Really, just the lack of any understanding of what you've actually accomplished so far. I love the journey accomplishments and get a real sense of joy when that music queues up, but they're too generic to tell me anything truly meaningful about my exploration so far. These planets are YUUUUUUUGE; I'd like to know how much I've seen of one after four straight hours activating glyphs and digging holes through caves. 2%? 15%? I've uncovered what feels like a lot of Vy'Keen translations, but several sentences still only come in half-cocked. How many more words are left? How many relics are left on this planet, or drop pods, or outposts? Is it infinite, do they just keep spawning on the good planets? And in that case, is that a healthy way to operate in a game where half the reward is finding NEW planets, considering a good chunk of the audience for this game are likely going to be completionists who'd like to think if they commit themselves they could discover everything a small moon has to offer and see all of its surface area in a two hour flight in their ship? I understand the mystery element, but at some point the mystery feels a little empty and is actually detrimental to the gamer side of me that's been trained to fill the meters that tickle me.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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